Autodidact: (n) a self-taught person. Poet: (n) a person who writes poetry.
Autodidactpoet: (n) A blog full of thoughts from a self-taught writer.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Storying the Silence

I'm thinking tonight about the ways we tell our
stories.

I pay a lot of attention to body language. It's always been part of who I am, but that
skill has been honed over time and through hundreds of sessions. I see the trembling hands. The too-short nails, the sores on the arms,
the slump of the shoulders, the twisting of the hair, the folded arms, the
slight turn of the body when I start speaking.
These movements tell stories. Not
the whole story, of course, but a story.
One of our stories. The story of
that moment, perhaps.

I think I became a psychologist in part because I am
fascinated by people's stories. This
stuff is what makes up our lives. We
live our lives in the meanings we make -- in the ways we story ourselves and
our relationships and what happens to us.
There is power in stories. There
is power in telling stories and writing stories. There is power in creating other stories, or
imagining other endings, and there is power in telling the same story over, and
over, and over again. We tell the same stories in different ways:
sometimes they are funny and true, and we tell them again and they are also sad
and true, or broken and true, or angry and true...there are so many ways to
tell a story, and all of them can be true.
We humans can be complicated like that.

So we tell complicated stories. Or we tell simple stories, or we let
complication masquerade as simplicity, and let simplicity try on complication for
size. We tell fantastical pretend
stories that could be true. And stories
that are not quite true that stick like truth in your bloodstream. Stories that almost false, but taste like
freedom. Stories that you pass off as
lies that reek of truth, and stories that you pass as truth that reek of lies
with a truth-nugget center. We tell our
stories from one lens, and then we back up and tell it again when the light is
different, and again when we change our clothes, and again from the other side
of the room. These stories are truth.

I realized last night, too, the ways that silence also tells
the story. There are times when the
story is stuck firmly in your throat, in your heart, in your stomach, and try
as you might to tell something -- someone else's story, or a pretend story, or
just any words in any sentence you can form -- you can't. The story's stuck. And this, perhaps, is the loudest story of
all. That silent story -- the one you
can't move around -- it speaks louder than the stories we tell. It speaks louder, even, than the trembling
hands and the twisting hair. We have to
try to story the not-telling, and story the silence to make it real and
truthful. We have to story the stuck,
and the block, and the unmoving, unflinching silence that comes from us, and
this is hard. It is, perhaps, one of the
hardest stories we create: the story of the time we had no story. That time we had no words. That time, when our story was told only by
the things we didn't say, and the way it screamed itself over, and over, and
over again in the silence. The way it
bled into relationship silently while you tried to hide it, and the way you
live with that betrayal.

And this is where I find myself: trying to find the story
behind the silence in the wake the silence created. I am trying to unpack the meaning of the
silence, and feel its heaviness and its lightness. I'm trying to learn if silence was an answer
I can live with. Trying to learn if the
silence was truth or lie, or slightly true, or if it was just...empty. I'm trying to find that nugget of truth in
the center. My body was still in that
silence - she didn't twitch, or wiggle, or twirl her hair -- she sat, quietly,
waiting for words, or story, or something to move us forward -- and it didn't
come. There was silence. Only silence, holding all that was and was not told in the absence of words.

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About Me

"My continuing passion is to part a curtain,
that invisible shadow that falls between people,
the veil of indifference to each other's presence,
each other's wonder, each other's human plight."
Eudora Welty